Friday, May 8, 2015

Herald by N.F. Houck is Finally a Proper eBook

Yes, it’s finally happened. Herald by N.F. Houck (that’s my pen name -- well, one of them), my fictional “autobiography” of the Greek god Hermes, is at long last in eReader-friendly form, meaning it is now downloadable from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc., for Kindles, Nooks, etc. To find it in a bookseller’s website, just do a search for “Herald Houck” and it should pop up. Sorry this whole process took so long. Modern ebook conversion methods are a bit more involved than I anticipated.
When ebooks were in their infancy, the process of converting print to ebook form was very easy. All one had to do to create an ebook was use the same electronic files used to create the print book, usually via a PDF. Almost nothing had to be stripped out, converted, reformatted, etc. That’s not true anymore -- the EPUB/MOBI process has additional requirements. Because Herald had some tricky formatting and graphics, some changes had to be made to get it properly converted to EPUB form. Most of the changes had to do with the general appearance of the print book and a few of its “perks.” For example, in the new ebook, there are no Greek alphabet characters. The map has been removed, as well as some little graphics that were embedded in the text. The result is lean, mean, efficient text that was very easy to convert. The hardest part was having all of the original formatting stripped out. The final ebook STILL has a few formatting errors -- Nothing that affects overall readability, so… It’s just time to let it go.
I couldn’t resist having a few text corrections made. Nothing major. I couldn’t help it. The opportunity was there, and the editor in me decided to take advantage of it (even though, admittedly, it is almost impossible for the average editor to edit his/her own stuff). As many have said, in this digital age, is a book ever truly finished?
Anyway, now that Herald is finally converted over, I can devote 100% of my attention to the sequel.
Okay, it’s not really a sequel -- more of a continuation. Part 2 of a series, if you will. Hermes is NOT the narrator of the second book. The narrator is a different deity, one that’s providing me with a completely different writing experience from Herald.
I have been asked several times how to write a book. Every author writes differently -- or in my case, writes differently every time. Because of this, in my opinion, the best way to write a book is to just sit down and start writing. Get your words -- what you want to write about -- down, and worry about all the technical stuff later. By doing that, you’ll discover how YOU write a book. Despite what many seem to believe, just sitting down to write a book is NOT easy for most people. It requires a great deal of self-discipline and work to make yourself write an entire book from beginning to end. It’s very time-consuming, and oftentimes it’s just plain BORING. With computers, there’s a huge advantage to just getting all of the preliminary writing down in a word processing file (I use OpenOffice) and then going back over it later to reorganize and make changes. So, just sit down and start writing. If you find you don’t have the patience or self-discipline to write an entire book, or you can’t think of something to write about, maybe it wasn’t meant to be.
Also, let me clear up one thing right now -- Bestselling authors are EXTREMELY rare. Less than 97% of all book writers make enough money from their publications to allow them to quit their day jobs. The reason bestselling authors become famous is because they ARE so rare. You can’t write a book expecting to get rich or famous. Getting rich would be nice, but the primary reason to write should be because you have a need to express yourself through the written word.
I have found that my writing style has a lot in common with method acting -- that is, getting inside the heads of characters and then just turning them loose. It’s a little dangerous, actually. Writing as Hermes was an almost completely joyful experience, as if he was eager to get the story out. Writing as this other deity -- okay, GODDESS -- for the second book is entirely different. It’s like, she wants to get her story out as well, but she’s worried about it. Also, there’s so much in her history that’s downright horrific, I start feeling depressed when I write for long stretches. That’s probably why it’s been taking me so long to get the book done. It WILL get done, though.